New Orleans' tech crowd unimpressed by NOLA.com

Starting this fall, The Times-Picayune will be all about the Web, so who better to go to for buy-in than New Orleans' tech community? As Gambit's Kevin Allman reports, NOLA Media Group President Ricky Mathews and NOLA.com editor James O'Byrne didn't exactly get a warm reception Wednesday night.

The crowd expressed unhappiness with NOLA.com, which after its redesign "more closely resembles a scrolling, Facebook-like stream of stories."

“The UI [user interface] -- it’s one of the worst websites I use every day. By a lot,” said one man. “If you load a page on NOLA.com, less than 15 percent of it is content. The rest of it is ads, and links to more content, and if you mouse down to get to it, there’s a giant menu that covers whatever scrap of content that remains.”

Asked what newspaper sites they liked, the crowd had plenty of answers: The New York Times, Bloomberg, the Los Angeles Times. ...

“I just think we all want to see you have a website which is not the website you have,” said one man, “that is worthy of the kind of journalism that came out after [Hurricane] Katrina, the [Louisiana INCarcerated] prison system series, all that. It’s not there, and I’m sure some of your journalists are waiting to see it as well."

Advances' websites are generally run by Advance Digital, which is separate from its various newspaper properties. In the new setup, NOLA Media Group will oversee content and sales for the newspaper and the website.

Here's what Andrew Sherry, vice president of communications for Knight, told me via email about that:

Knight Foundation is willing to engage with any organization that is serious about serving its community through the dissemination of news and information on digital platforms, including the NOLA Media Group. But we prefer not to comment on discussions that may or may not be under way about individual grants.

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Steve Myers was the managing editor of Poynter.org until August 2012, when he became the deputy managing editor and senior staff writer for The Lens, a nonprofit investigative news site in New Orleans.